Language History and Changes

Language History and Changes Yule, G. (1996) The Study of Language. UK. Cambridge University Press Mariana Alarcón González September 9th, 2008

LANGUAGE HISTORY AND CHANGE Sanskrit is the ancient Language of Indian law, the classical Language of India and may be the oldest one, which had been studied by a British government official called Sir William Jones, who was working as a judge of the high court in India. During 1786, Sir William suggested that a number of languages from very different geographical areas must have some common ancestor, however this common ancestor could not be described from any existing records, but had to be hypothesized on the basis of similar features existing in records of languages which were believed to be descendants.

Established as the “great-grand mother” of many modern languages in the Indian sub-continent (Indo), and in Europe (European). “Proto” is a term that came into use to describe that common ancestor “Proto-Indo-European”. This term was established during the 19th century by linguistics dedicated to the historical study of languages (philology).

Diagram: Proto-Indo-European Proto-Indo-European Balto-Slavic Indo-Iranian Indic Iranian Germanic Celtic Italic Hellenic Baltic Slavic Sanskrit Latin Ancient Greek German English Dutch Danish Swedish Norwegian Etc. Gaelic Irish Welsh Etc. Italian Spanish Frenc Portuguese Romanian Etc. Greek Latvian Lithuanian Russian Polish Czech Bulgarian Etc. Hindi Bengali Etc. Persian

a)The process that we use to establish family connections between different languages is called “Cognates”. A cognate of a word in one language is a word in another language which has a similar form and is or was, used with a similar meaning. For example: EnglishGermanSpanishItalian Mother Mutter Madre Madre Father Vater Padre Padre Friend Freund Amigo Amico According with the explanation above, the common ancestor of the Spanish and Italian words is in the Italic Branch, and in the case of English and German words, the common ancestor of those words is in the Germanic branch.

b) There is another process called “Comparative Reconstruction”, that is a process in which we use Cognates to get information about a language. The aim of this procedure is to reconstruct what must have been the original form in the common ancestral language, and this is possible looking for common features on the basis of some general principles. These principles are: • The mayority principle. • The most natural development principle.

a)The majority principle, is very straightforward. Consist on, if in a cognate set, 3 forms begin with a [p] sound and one form begins with a [b] sound, then we suppose that majority have retained the original sound [p], and the minority has changed a little through time. b) The most natural development principle, is based on the fact that certain types of sound-change are very common, whereas others are extremely unlikely.

For example: • Final vowels often disappear. • Voiceless sounds become voiced between vowels. • Stops become fricatives (under certain conditions) • Consonants become voiceless at the end of words. Concluding, the main difference between these principles is that majority principle is based on morphology changes, in the meantime, the most natural development principle is based on the fact that certain types of sound-changes are common.

The language changes • The historical development of English is usually divided into 3 major periods: Old English (7th-11th century), Middle English (1100-1500) and Modern English (1500-to the present). • The Old English: probably began with Germanic language, spoken by a group of tribes from northern Europe. The tribes were the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. These tribes were called “Anglo-Saxons”, because of the name of the first two tribes. To describe these people, and from the Angles, that we get the word for their language, Englisc, and for their new home, Engla-land.

From the Englisc, we have many of the most basic terms in English: mann (man), wīf (woman), cild (child), hūs (house), mete (food), etan (eat), drincan (drink) and feohtan (fight). • These settlers were pagan, however from the 6th to the 8th century, the Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity where a number of terms from the language of religion, Latin, came into English at that time: angel, bishop, candle, church, martyr, priest and school.

From the 8th to the 10th century, another group arrived in the coastal regions of Britain, they were “The Vikings”, and from their language, Old Norse, we derived the forms which gave us a number of common terms such as: give, law, skin, sky, take and they. • The Middle English: there is no doubt that the event that marks the end of the Old English and the beginning of the Middle English is the invasion of the Normans in England under William the conqueror in 1066.

The Normans were French speakers and as invaders, they became the ruling class, as consequence of this, for the following 200 years, the French language became the dominant language of the nobility, the government and the law. Some moderns terms were added during this period: army, court, defense, faith, prison and tax.

The most noticeable difference in this period, was the division of the society and the language used by each one, this means, as the dominant class were the Normans, called upper class, they used French language, and they talked about: mutton, beef, and pork, while the lower class, the peasants, worked on the land and reared: sheep, cows and swine (words from Old English).

One of the most obvious differences between Modern English and the English spoken in earlier periods is in the quality of the vowel sound. In some words, their general form has remained the same, but their vowel sound have changed considerably. For example: OldEnglishModernEnglish hu:s haws (house) wi:f wayf (wife) spo:n spu:n (spoon)

Not always a sound changed, some sounds simply disappeared. One notable example is a voiceless velar fricative /x/ which was used in Old English pronunciation of “nicht”, as [nixt], but is absent in the present-day form “night” as [nayt]. • There is a phonetic phenomena called “metathesis”, that involves a reversal in position of 2 adjoining sounds. For example: acsian ask bridd bird frist first hros horse

This phenomena may actually occur between non-adjoining sounds. For example: LatinSpanish Parabola Palabra (word) Periculum Peligro (danger) Miraculum Milagro (miracle) In the first word of the example above, the Spanish form “palabra” was created from the Latin “parabola”, via the reversal of th [l] and [r] sounds. And that pattern is repeated in the other 2 forms.

There is another phenomena called “epenthesis”, that involves the addition of a sound to the middle of a word. For example: aemptig empty spinel spindle timr timber • But, there is a last type of phenomena called “prothesis” that involves the addition of a sound to the beginning of a word. It is very common in the change of pronunciation of some forms from Latin to Spanish.

For example: LatinSpanish Schola Escuela (school) Spiritus Espíritu (spirit) Native speaker of Spanish who are learning English as a second language will often add a vowel sound to the beginning of some English words. For example: strange estrange story estory

Some noticeable differences between the structure of sentences in Old and Modern English involve word order, the changes of the structure of sentences are called “Syntactic changes”. In Old English texts. We find the subject-verb object, the most common structure of sentences in Modern English. However we can also find a number of different orders which are no longer possible. For example: • the subject can follow the verb: fērde he (he traveled).

The object can be placed at the before the verb: hēhine geseah (he saw him). • The object can be placed at the beginning of the sentence: him man ne sealde (no man gave [any] to him). As we can see in the last example, the use of the negative form also differs from Modern English. A “double-negative” construction was also possible, as in the following example, using “not” and “never”. For example: And ne sealdest þū mē næfreān ticcen (and) (not) (gave) (you) (me) (never) (a) (kid) “and you never gave me a kid”

Perhaps the most sweeping change in the form of English sentences was the loss of a large number of inflectional affixes from many parts of speech. For example: the verb form “sealde” (he gave) and “sealdest” (you gave) are differentiated by inflectional suffixes which are no longer found in Modern English. Nouns, adjectives, articles and pronouns all took different inflectional forms according to their grammatical function in the sentence.

The most obvious way in which Modern English differs lexically from Old English is in the number of borrowed words, particularly words of Latin and Greek. A common Old English term for “man” was “were”. This is no longer in general use, but within the domain of horror films, it has survived in the compound form, werewolf. It exists 2 processes of broadening and narrowing of Meaning.

For example: • Broadening: the change from holy day as a religious feast to the general break from work called a holyday. • Narrowing: is the reverse process. Example: mete, once used for nay kind of food, which has in its form, meat, become restricted to only some specific types. A different kind of narrowing can lead to a negative meaning for words that previously were simply “ordinary” (= vulgar) or “worth nothing” (= naughty).

None of the changes described here happened overnight. They were gradual and probably difficult to discern while they were in progress. The most pervasive source of change in language seems to be in the continual process of cultural transmission. Each new generation has to find a way of using the language of the previous generation. Given this tenuous transmission process, it should be expected that languages will not remain stable, but that change and variation are inevitable.

The variations mentioned are: • Language viewed diachronically: the historical perspective of change through time. • Language viewed synchronically: differences within one language in different places and among different groups at the same time.

Language History and Changes